[Myexperiment-discuss] Fwd: A formal account of the open provenance model

[Khalid Belhajjame]

Potentially interesting.

khalid


-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	A formal account of the open provenance model
Resent-Date:	Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:31:41 +0000
Resent-From:	address@hidden
Date:	Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:28:22 +0000
From:	Luc Moreau <address@hidden>
To:	address@hidden, "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
CC:	Natalia Kwasnikowska <address@hidden>, Jan Van den Bussche <address@hidden>

To the provenance community,

Natalia, Jan and myself are pleased to announce the availability of the
following paper, which can be downloaded from http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21819/


A formal account of the open provenance model.
Natalia Kwasnikowska, Luc Moreau, and Jan Van den Bussche.

The Open Provenance Model (OPM) is a community data model for provenance that is designed to facilitate the meaningful interchange of provenance information between systems. Underpinning OPM, is a notion of directed graph, used to represent data products and processes in- volved in past computations, and dependencies between them; it is complemented by inference rules allowing new dependencies to be derived. The Open Provenance Model was designed from requirements captured in two `Provenance Challenges', and tested during the third: these challenges were international, multi-disciplinary activities aiming to exchange provenance information between multiple systems and query it. The design of OPM was mostly driven by practical and pragmatic considerations. The purpose of this paper is to formalize the theory underpinning this data model. Specifically, this paper proposes a temporal semantics for OPM graphs, defined in terms of a set of ordering constraints between time-points associated with OPM constructs. OPM inferences are characterized with respect to this temporal semantics, and a novel set of patterns is introduced to establish soundness and completeness properties. Building on this novel foundation, the paper proposes new definitions for graph algebraic operations, graph refinement and the notion of account, by which multiple descriptions of a same execution are allowed to co-exist in a same graph. Overall, this paper provides a strong theoretical underpinning to a data model being adopted by a community of users that help its disambiguation and promote inter-operability.

Best regards,
Natalia, Jan and Luc

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau               
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487         
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865         
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: address@hidden  
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm